Dataprotector

When dealing with Microsoft Exchange restore requests, you will come across three different restore situations:

• a database
• a single mailbox
• a single mailbox item (mail, calendar entry etc.)

Restoring a complete database is not a complicated task, but restoring a single mailbox, or a single mailbox item, is. First, you need to restore the mailbox, that includes the desired mailbox, into a recovery database. Then you can restore the mailbox, or the mailbox items, from the recovery database. Some of the tasks can only be done with the Exchange Management Shell.

3 days ago, on 13th October 2016, HPE has released patch bundle 9,08 for Data Protector 9. A patch bundle isn’t a directly installable version, instead it’s a bundle of patches and enhancements for a specific version of Data Protector, in this case Data Protector 9.

Beside fixes for discovered problems, a patch bundle includes also enhancements. There are some enhancements in this patch bundle, that have caught my attention particularly.

Recently, a customer has informed me, that copy sessions to encrypted devices failed, after he has made an update to Data Protector 9.07. The copy sessions failed with this error:

|Critical| From: BMA@<hostname> "" Time: <Date><Time>
|90:6111| Error retrieving encryption key.

The customer uses tape encryption. The destination for the backups is a HPE StoreOnce, and a post-backup copy creates a copy of the data on tape. Backup to disk was running fine, but the copy to tape failed immediately.

Today I got an email from HPE, which has informed me of the imminent end of support for HPE Data Protector 7.0x 8.0x. As of June 30, 2016, HPE will offer no new updates or patches for Data Protector 7.0x and 8.0x. This means that

• Telephone and email support
• new security updates, and
• new product updates

will be phased out. The self-help support will be continued until June 30, 2018. Self-help includes access to the knowledge base, current patches and access to known problems.

Last year in December, I updated the first customer from HPE Data Protector 9.04 to 9.05. Immediately after the first tests I noticed, that backups were made using the NBDSSL transport. I expected that the SAN transport would be used, because the prerequisites were met and it has worked until the update. I opened a case at the HPE support und I was advised to install the hotfix QCIM2A65619. With this hotfix, several files were replaced:

The Virtual Environment Integration (VE Integration) provides protection of VMs in virtual server environments. It is used o integrate HPE Data Protector with various virtualization environments, currently VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. For Citrix XenServer is a script solution available. I will focus on VMware vSphere.

What is possible?

I took this table from the “HPE Data Protector 9.00 Integration Guide for Virtualization”.

Feature	VE Integration
Online backup	✓
Crash-consistent backup	✓
Application-consistent backup	✓
Granularity	vmdk, vmx
Full/ Incremental/ Differential	✓/ ✓/ ✓
Support for changed block tracking (CBT)	✓
Where does the Data Protector component need to be installed?	backup host
Extra licenses needed	1x On-Line Extension per ESXi host

As you can see, Data Protector offers all you need to create a crash-consistent backup of your VMs. HPE Data Protector relies on the VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection (formerly known as VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection or VADP). Data Protector has to use the same API as Veeam, CommVault Simpana or any other product that can be used to backup VMs in a VMware vSphere environment. Therefore, most software products offer the same features.

Today I had a customer call, where a Exchange 2010 backup repeatedly failed. HPE Data Protector was unable to create a differential or incremental backup. For each database, the following error was logged:

[Minor] From: OB2BAR_E2010_BAR@exchangeserver.domain.tld "MS Exchange 2010+ Server"  Time: 21.03.2016 20:00:27
[170:313] 	One or more copies of database DATABASE are already being backed up in a different session.

Interestingly, there was no other backup session running. But the night before, the backup jobs failed because of a network failure.

HPE Data Protector stores multiple backup objects on a single Catalyst store item. A backup object can be a volume, a mount point, a database or a virtual machine. You can have multiple backup objects per backup client. If your filesystem backup job has four backup clients, and each client has two volumes, the backup job will contain 8 backup objects. Another example is a single database of a Microsoft SQL or Oracle database server (instance).

After installing the Data Protector patch bundle 8.13, you may ran into this error when trying to restore data from a HP StoreOnce appliance.

[Normal] From: RSM@dpcm.lab.local ""  Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:10
	Restore session 2014/12/04-8 started.

[Normal] From: RMA@fileserver.lab.local "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]"  Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:12
	STARTING Media Agent "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]"

[Normal] From: RMA@fileserver.lab.local "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]"  Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:13
	Loading medium from slot 192.168.200.101Store_1257902bf_54796efc_04f4_005c to device D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]

[Major] From: RMA@fileserver.lab.local "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]"  Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:15
[90:52]  	192.168.200.101Store_1257902bf_54796efc_04f4_005c
	Cannot read from device (JSONizer error: Device read failure)

[Normal] From: RMA@fileserver.lab.local "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]"  Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:15
	Unloading medium to slot \\192.168.200.101\Store_1\257902bf_54796efc_04f4_005c from device D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]

[Normal] From: RMA@fileserver.lab.local "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]"  Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:15
	ABORTED Media Agent "D2D_GW1 [GW 6408:0:7255964966039732580]"

[Normal] From: RSM@dpcm.lab.local ""  Time: 04.12.2014 09:13:15

	Restore Statistics:
          
		Session Queuing Time (hours)         0,00        
		------------------------------------------- 
		Completed Disk Agents ........          0          
		Failed Disk Agents ...........          1          
		Aborted Disk Agents ..........          0          
		------------------------------------------- 
		Disk Agents Total  ...........          1          
		===========================================      
		Completed Media Agents .......          0          
		Failed Media Agents ..........          0          
		Aborted Media Agents .........          1          
		------------------------------------------- 
		Media Agents Total  ..........          1          
		===========================================      
		Mbytes Total .................       0 MB        
		Used Media Total .............          1          
		Disk Agent Errors Total ......          0

This problem is known and it is described in QCCR2A56465. A fix is available (new BMA, CMA, MMA and RMA binaries). Simply open a service request and ask for the fix. Make sure that you add a copy of the session messages or a screenshot to the service request.

This applies to upgrades from Data Protector 6.x and 7.x to 8.x and 9.x.

It seems that today is my debugging day… Yesterday I performed a Data Protector update from 7.03 to 8.13. During this update, the Data Protector IDB is migrated to another database format. Last night the backups went smoothly, but today I noticed that two old Detail Catalog Binary File (DCBF) directories were still referenced in the HP Data Protector IDB.